A Project Guide to UX Design

I currently manage a wonderful group of user experience designers at Manifest Digital. Several of our group were relatively new to real world project work upon joining the company, coming from graduate classes in Human Computer Interaction or Interaction Design. We asked them what it was like to go from the classroom to a project situation.

We got a strong message back. College courses had prepared them with the tools and frameworks for applying user-centered design processes, but hadn't really prepared them for the many dynamics they would encounter on the projects themselves. The many different roles on projects - the challenges and, sometimes, frustrations of having to make a case for UCD to a variety of different people who had their own needs and motivations - the occasional frustrations of stops, starts, and miscommunication - all these things had a much greater impact on their daily lives than their education had led them to believe.

Russ Unger and I decided to write a book to help bridge this gap in classroom learning and learning in the project field. It's called A Project Guide to UX Design, and we hope it helps both students in HCI related fields who are getting into project work, and those already working on projects who would like to learn more about the basic UXD toolset.

Learn more about the book here:
http://tinyurl.com/84zwa8

If you read it, let us know what you think! You can also get updates and a bonus sample chapter by visiting the book's website here:
http://www.projectuxd.com

Long time no see

It's hard for me to believe it's been so long since my last post - coming on 3 years. I was such an early adopter (or so it felt like at the time) blogging in 2003 and just when the biggest wave hit, I walked away. Why is that?

Well, they say that for every social networking situation, you have the contributors and you have the lurkers. Lurkers observe and appreciate the dynamic... maybe they throw the occasional comment in like dipping their toes into the pool. But they don't jump all the way in. Meanwhile there are so many folks out there who are doing laps and throwing pool parties.

Part of me shared in the luddite cynicism of the poolsiders. Why would anyone care about relatively random thoughts shared by a stranger? It took me a long time to "get it" with Twitter too - something that many in the field of user experience take as the leading channel for networking. It is a great tool, but we can't lose sight of the fact that the great majority of the users we design for still don't understand or use Twitter - and sometimes even scoff at it. We can say they're behind the times, but so were the people who weren't using 8-tracks.

We don't know for sure how long blogs and micro-blogs are going to be so popular. I'm guessing that we'll reach that saturation point sometime and long for the days of fewer choices or flock to aggregators. In the meantime, there's a giddiness to seeing the pure overwhelming breadth of opinion and thought leadership available so easily now, and the intimacy (or at least the appearance of intimacy) with some amazing people. Some aspect of that will never go away, but the pendulum is going to swing towards some consolidation at some point, and I'll be very interested to see what form that takes.

In the meantime, I'm finally jumping into that pool. Ready for a swim?